M
rs. Brooke.” The nurse stepped half out the door that led to the examination rooms and waited for Adrienne to stand up and run to her like an obedient dog.
Instead, Adrienne looked around as if hoping some other woman would look up from leafing through a tattered six-month-old magazine to answer the call. After all, she hadn’t been Mrs. Brooke for years. She told everybody she met she was Adrienne Mason as if she’d never been married, but she’d never made the name change official.
Her social security card read Adrienne Mason Brooke and that’s the name they’d used when she’d moved up into the manager’s position at the restaurant and been eligible for the health insurance coverage. She’d never had health insurance before. Hadn’t been to a doctor more than five times since she’d left Hollyhill. Waitresses didn’t have benefits. They just had to work their tails off and smile and act as if they weren’t waiting on idiots. Then if they were lucky and the idiots felt generous, they might get enough tips to pay the rent.
Now she was managing the restaurant. Now she had insurance. And the gods that be must have decided to punish her for getting so middle-class. Of course Francine, the only person she’d let know she was going to the doctor at all, told her she was lucky that she’d gotten on the insurance before she found the lump. As if “lucky” and “cancer” could be in the same sentence.
Francine had been careful not to say the C-word out loud. Nobody had yet. That’s why Adrienne wanted to stay in the plastic waiting room chair with the California sunshine streaming in the window behind her, making her too hot. Making the sweat pop out on her forehead while her hands, clasped tightly in her lap, felt clammy cold.
But the woman in the nurse’s white stayed in the door, looked straight across the room at Adrienne, and spoke again. “Adrienne Brooke.” Almost as if saying you’re going to have to hide better than that. The woman was smiling as though she were holding out a prize to Adrienne that she just had to walk through the door to claim. Here, entrance to one lucky person.
That word again. Lucky. Adrienne was suddenly too aware of her left breast as though the lump in it had ballooned and was ready to blow a hole through her chest.
Adrienne stood up. The eyes of the two men who had brought their wives to their doctors’ appointments followed her as she moved across the room. She still had it even if she was knocking on the door to forty. Everybody guessed her closer to thirty. Sometimes that’s how old she said she was.
Actually she looked better now than she had when she was thirty. When she was thirty she was still stuck in Hollyhill, still the preacher’s wife. But she had changed that. Changed everything. Reinvented herself the way she should have when she was eighteen. The way she’d thought she was doing when she’d ambushed David Brooke when he came home on leave for his father’s funeral. She’d been so sure she could get David to leave Hollyhill after the war. She thought once he’d seen the great wide world, he’d want to be out where people lived. Where they didn’t just vegetate the way they did in Hollyhill.
But no, he came home from the war a man of God. A preacher. How could she fight that? Even if she had been in love with him. He’d always been praying for her. Praying she’d change. Whole churches had prayed for her as though she had some kind of terrible disease that needed a miracle cure. She’d found her own cure. Out on the road. Away from Hollyhill.
She watched the pudgy nurse’s hips bounce up and down as she followed her down the hall to the examining room. She sat in the chair as told and let the woman take her blood pressure. Perfect as always. She was in perfect health. Perfect shape.
“The doctor will be in to see you in just a few minutes.” The woman was no longer smiling now that she only had an audience of one. Nurses didn’t have to depend on tips to pay their rent.
The nurse waddled out of the room, shutting the door behind her. Adrienne shivered in the cold air streaming down on her from a ceiling vent. She felt as if she’d been shut up inside a refrigerator. Everything was white or stainless steel. She was the only color in her red scoop neck top that showed cleavage and clung to her body. A catsup bottle left behind and forgotten in the sterile cold.
No, that wasn’t the right color red. The red she was wearing was more like a tomato fresh off the vine. She liked to wear red. It made a statement. The blonde in the red dress. She’d gone California blonde the week after she crossed the border into the state and knew she’d finally arrived at the place she’d left Hollyhill to find.
Hollyhill. She shook her head. Why was Hollyhill popping into her head over and over today? She never thought about Hollyhill. Or what she’d left behind there. She’d been glad to shake free. She’d given up Jocie at birth— or really, before. She’d have never carried her to term if David hadn’t practically locked her up in the house so she couldn’t do anything about it. Tabitha had tagged along with her when she finally drove away from Holly–hill. She hadn’t been invited. She just caught Adrienne leaving in the middle of the night and refused to get out of the car.
Adrienne hadn’t wanted Tabitha along. She wanted to shake free of everything about Hollyhill and being a preacher’s wife. But once they were in Chicago and Tabitha was calling her DeeDee instead of Mother, it was sort of nice having her there. She never caused Adrienne any trouble. At least not until California and she fell for that drummer in Eddie’s band. Got knocked up and refused to fix the problem even though it wasn’t that hard to do in California. Not like in Hollyhill.
Back in Hollyhill a woman just had to jump on one foot for an hour and pray that she could shake the baby seed loose. Adrienne didn’t remember who had told her that. Probably her mother. Her mother had always said the weirdest things. Still did on the rare occasions she called from her retirement village somewhere in Florida. She’d left Hollyhill even before Adrienne had.
It hadn’t worked anyway. Just made your leg and foot sore. Neither had prayer. Babies weren’t that easy to lose. But Tabitha hadn’t wanted to lose hers. Seemed to be thoroughly enraptured by the kid now that he’d been born even with his brown skin like his father’s. That had surely shaken up the good folks in Hollyhill.
Tabitha had sent a picture last week. Adrienne had peeked at it in the envelope, but she hadn’t pulled it out. She didn’t know what Tabitha wanted from her. She’d told her from day one that she couldn’t be a grandmother.
She couldn’t have cancer either. Not breast cancer. Women who had breast cancer had to have their breasts cut off. She looked down at the two perfectly matched mounds stretching the material of her red top. Maybe that’s why she kept thinking about Hollyhill and all those churches that used to pray for her when she didn’t need it. Maybe now she needed it.
The doctor came into the room and sat down on the stainless steel stool with rollers. He said hello before he opened up the folder he was carrying and looked at it. He was young, nice looking. Nothing like she’d expected when she’d made the first appointment. She’d almost enjoyed being examined by him. Not that he wasn’t professional. He was. She just sort of wished he wasn’t. That they were meeting somewhere besides a sterile refrigerator.
His eyes touched on her breasts before he looked at her face. “I’m afraid I don’t have good news. I told you when you opted for the biopsy instead of the surgery that if the lump did turn out to be malignant, that you were just delaying your treatment and the faster we get on these tumors, the better.”
“And so the lump was malignant?” She asked it as a question, but it wasn’t. She’d known from the first instant she’d felt that foreign pebble-sized knot in her breast that it was not going to be benign.
“Yes, I’m afraid so.” He did really look sorry as his eyes touched on her breasts again. “Not only that, but it’s an aggressive strain.”
“Aggressive? What does that mean?” Of course she knew what aggressive meant. She dealt with aggressive people all the time. She was an aggressive person, but how could a lump in her breast be aggressive?
“Fast growing. The cancer is the fast-growing type. You need to have surgery right away. Tomorrow.”
“Surgery.” She felt like an idiot repeating everything he said. But she needed to absorb it. “You mean to remove the lump?”
“Not just the lump. With this kind of malignancy, we can’t do anything less than a radical mastectomy.”
She refused to let the words land in her brain. “It’s just three days until Christmas.”
“I know. That’s why you will need to check into the hospital tonight.”
“No.”
The young doctor looked up from scribbling something on her chart. Obviously very few people said no to him. He pushed his stool back until he was leaning against the white wall and stared at her. He wore a white doctor’s coat, but a red tie peeked out at the neck. Coordinated. It was good they were all so coordinated. It would have been better if he’d been blond, but he had plain brown hair a bit long over the ears as if he hadn’t wanted to completely give up his youthful hippie ways when he had to start following his calling to slice off women’s breasts. To save their lives, of course.
“No is not an answer you can afford to give, Mrs. Brooke. This isn’t cosmetic surgery we’re talking about. It’s a matter of life and death. Your life and death.”
“Call me Adrienne please. I never cared for the name Mrs. Brooke. It belonged to my ex-mother-in-law.” Adrienne flashed him her brightest smile. He’d think she was a dizzy blonde, but she didn’t care. While she might not be a real blonde, she was definitely dizzy right now.
“All right, Adrienne,” he said, speaking slowly as if weighing every word for the proper impact. “I don’t think you realize the seriousness of your condition. You have breast cancer. The malignancy has more than likely already spread to your lymph nodes. Without aggressive treatment, your survival chance is not only not good. It’s nonexistent. Without surgery, you’ll die.”
“Unless there is a miracle cure.” She didn’t know why she said that. Probably all the Hollyhill thoughts about churches praying. As well as she could remember, none of those prayers back then had been answered in a miracle. Certainly not the ones asking the Lord to make her the perfect preacher’s wife.
“Are you expecting a miracle?”
“No.”
“Then I’d suggest you follow the recommended treatment.” “And what are my chances if I do agree to the recommended treatment?”
He looked down at her chart again as if unable to look her in the eyes while he answered. “You’re relatively young. In good health otherwise. You should have no problem recovering from the surgery.”
“But my chances? What percentage of women with this, ah . . . ,” she hesitated on the word, “. . . this aggressive strain of cancer live those five magical years after surgery?”
“You have an excellent chance of being in the 30 percent of women who live through this.”
“Disfigured and maimed.”
“But alive. With a good prosthesis, no one will ever know you’ve had surgery.”
“I will. The man I love will.”
“If he doesn’t love you for more than your breast, he’s not worthy of you.” He looked up from her chart and fastened his eyes on her.
She thought about pointing out to him that she hadn’t said the man who loved her, but instead she stayed quiet as she met his eyes. He waited a long moment and then asked, “Are you refusing treatment?”
“No. But I need a little time first. To get used to the idea. I’ll come back in January. A couple of weeks can’t make that much difference, can it?”
“Perhaps the difference between 30 and 15 percent,” the doctor said softly. “I don’t advise it.”
“I understand,” Adrienne said.
“I fear you don’t, but I can’t force you to make the right decision.” He glanced at his watch, no doubt thinking of other patients stuck inside other refrigerator rooms, readier to listen to him or who might have already listened to him and sat waiting with their chests scraped clean for him to admire their scars.
Adrienne drove home, aware each time she took a breath and pushed her breasts out against her bra. The apartment was empty when she went in. Her eyes went to the old flat top guitar hanging on the wall over the television. Eddie had taught himself to play on that guitar when he was thirteen. Adrienne looked for it every time she came home and Eddie was gone. As long as the guitar was still there, he’d be back.
She checked the clock. It was already nearly five. He’d be at the club getting ready for his set that night. Maybe she’d stay home. Let the pretty young things make eyes at him while he sang. She was tired and she needed to put up the Christmas tree.
Eddie had asked last night why she hadn’t decorated yet. She’d almost told him then about the doctor and the C-word, but she hadn’t. He would split. They’d been together three years. Love on her side. Convenience on his. It wouldn’t be convenient to have a girlfriend with cancer.
Adrienne dropped her keys down on the table. They hit Tabitha’s letter and jarred the picture she’d sent halfway out of the envelope. Adrienne picked the photo up and stared at Tabitha’s baby grinning up at her. He had Tabitha’s eyes. Not just Tabitha’s, but her own eyes.
Adrienne ripped the picture across once and then put the pieces together and ripped it again before she dropped it in the wastebasket. She got a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with ice. The diet soda she poured had that nasty artificial sweetener taste, but she couldn’t afford the calories of the regular soda. She caught her reflection in the window over the sink. She had to look good in her coffin.
She poured the drink down the sink. Then she dumped three drawers looking for a roll of transparent tape. She had to have some tape somewhere. She finally found a roll on top of the refrigerator still there from when Tabitha used to tape notes to the fridge to let Adrienne know where she was. Adrienne had never told her to. She just had.
Adrienne was already crying as she picked the pieces of the picture of Tabitha’s baby out of the trashcan. She blinked away the tears so she could see where the torn edges of the picture pieces matched up. It took her a long time to get them taped back together just right because of the way her hands were shaking. Then she looked into the baby’s eyes and let the tears roll unchecked down her cheeks.